[WJW]

Obviously only a requirement if you intend your software to run under windows. But if you don't, why bother. Not all software is intended to be distributed to users far and wide. Some of it is just for yourself, and some of it will only ever run on linux servers.

[forrestthewoods]

> some of it will only ever run on linux servers.

I’ve spent quite a lot of time dealing with code that will ever run on Linux which did not in fact only ever run on Linux!

Obviously for hobby projects anyone can do what they want. But adult projects should support Windows imho and consider Windows support from the start. Cross-platform is super easy unless you choose to make it hard.

[matheusmoreira]

> But adult projects should support Windows imho and consider Windows support from the start.

Hope whatever "adult" is working on the project this is getting paid handsomely. They'd certainly need to pay me big bucks to care about Windows support.

In any case, Linux system call ABI is becoming a lingua franca of systems programming. BSDs have implemented Linux system calls. Windows has straight up included Linux in the system. It looks like simply targeting Linux can easily result in a binary that actually does run anywhere.

[codedokode]

Try playing audio or displaying image on the screen using only documented syscalls. And make it work on all platforms you mentioned.

[matheusmoreira]

Displaying an image on the screen is not that difficult a task. Linux has framebuffer device files. You open them, issue an ioctl to get metadata like screen geometry and color depth, then mmap the framebuffer as an array of pixels you can CPU render to. It's eerily similar to the way terminal applications work.

It's also possible to use Linux KMS/DRM without any user space libraries.

https://github.com/laxyyza/drmlist/

The problem with hardware accelerated rendering is much of the associated functionality is actually implemented in user space and therefore not part of the kernel. They unfortunately force the libc on us. One would have to reimplement things like Mesa in order to do this. Not impossible, just incredibly time consuming.

Things could have been organized in a way that makes this feasible. Example: SQLite. You can plug in your own memory allocation functions and VFS layer. I've been slowly porting the SQLite Unix VFS to freestanding Linux in order to use it in my freestanding applications.

[forrestthewoods]

> Windows has straight up included Linux in the system. It looks like simply targeting Linux can easily result in a binary that actually does run anywhere.

Kind of. But not really. WSL2 is a thing. But most code isn’t running in WSL2 so if your thing “runs on windows” but requires running in a WSL2 context then oftentimes it might as well not exist.

> They'd certainly need to pay me big bucks to care about Windows support.

The great irony is that Windows is a much much much better and more pleasant dev environment. Linux is utterly miserable and it’s all modern programmers know. :(

[1718627440]

There is also WSL1 and Cygwin and MinGW/MSYS2.

And no WSL2 is not a newer version of WSL1, they are entirely different products.

[forrestthewoods]

MinGW is awful. Avoid. Cygwin is honestly not really something that has come up in my career.

I don’t know why Linux people are so adamant to break their backs - and the backs of everyone around them - to try and do things TheLinuxWay. It’s weird. IMHo it’s far far far better and to take a “when in Rome” approach.

My experience is that Linux people are MUCH worse at refusing to take a When in Rome approach than the other way. The great tragedy is that the Linux way is not always the best way.

[1718627440]

I found MinGW to be quite nice, but ymmv.

> to try and do things TheLinuxWay

It's not really about TheLinuxWay. It's more that Microsoft completely lacks POSIX tools at all and the compiler needs to have a complete IDE installed, which I would need a license for, and the compiler invocation also doesn't really correspond to any other compiler.

[WJW]

I don't think we are talking about the same type of software? The type I was talking about will only ever run on Linux because it's a (HTTP-ish) server that will only ever run on Linux.

Probably a server that is only ever run by a single company on a single CPU type. That company will have complete control of the OS stack, so if it says no Windows, then no Windows has to be supported.

[forrestthewoods]

cool

[vidarh]

I've worked on dozens of "adult" projects for 30 years, only 2 of which ever needed to run against the Win32 API, and only one of which ever ran on Windows. There's a whole world of people out there who don't care about Windows compatibility because it's usually not relevant to the work we do.